Synopsis

ACT I. Russia and Poland, 1598–1605. In a snowy courtyard near Moscow, Russian peasants are goaded by police into clamoring for Boris Godunov to claim the vacant throne. Shchelkalov, secretary of the Duma (parliament), announces that Boris refuses. Having finally agreed to accept the crown, Boris stops to acknowledge the acclaim of all Moscow, but in his heart he is haunted by a strange foreboding.

While the old monk Pimen is finishing his history of Russia in a dark monastery cell, the novice Grigori awakens. When Grigori questions Pimen about the dead Tsarevich Dimitri, the old man tells him Boris ordered the murder of the boy (who would have been Grigori’s age) so that he could become tsar himself. Alone, Grigori cries that Boris’s crime will be punished. On the Lithuanian border, an Innkeeper welcomes three guests — two noisy drunken friars, Varlaam and Missail, and the disguised Grigori, now a renegade wanted by the police. When an illiterate border guard enters with a warrant for Grigori’s arrest, the young man reads it, pretending it describes Varlaam. Outraged, the besotted monk laboriously deciphers the true description, but Grigori escapes through a window.

In his study in the tsar’s palace, Boris comforts his bereaved daughter, who has lost her fiancé, and joins his son in a geography lesson. Growing pensive, he sends them out and receives his shifty adviser, Prince Shuisky, who reports a Polish-based insurrection led by someone claiming to be Dimitri. This, combined with Boris’s own guilty dreams, drives the tsar to fury and frenzied hallucination, as he imagines he sees the ghost of the tsarevich.

ACT II. In the castle of Sandomir in Poland, the ambitious Princess Marina muses on Grigori’s plans to conquer Russia and her own dream of becoming tsarina. The Jesuit Rangoni tells her to enslave the false Dimitri with her beauty and bring Russia under the dominion of Rome.

An elegant polonaise sweeps through the castle gardens, leaving Marina to woo Grigori. Overwhelmed by dreams of glory, the two swear love as Rangoni exults in the shadows.

ACT III. In Moscow, before the Cathedral of St. Basil, the people wonder if Dimitri still lives. When Boris comes out of the church, a Simpleton, who has been teased and robbed by a group of children, asks the tsar to kill them the way he killed Dimitri. Boris protects the deranged man and asks him to pray for him, but the Simpleton says he cannot intercede for a child’s murderer.

The Duma doesn’t believe Shuisky’s tale of Boris’s hysteria until the tsar himself staggers in, protesting his innocence in Dimitri’s death. Pimen is summoned to tell how a blind shepherd was healed at the grave of the murdered tsarevich. Crushed by this omen, Boris sends for his son, bidding him farewell and naming him heir to the throne. As bells toll, Boris falls dying, begging God for mercy. Shuisky and the other boyars return to place Boris’s young son on the throne.

In the Kromy Forest, revolutionary peasants harass a boyar and two Jesuits. Grigori, hailed as Dimitri, passes in triumph with his army, headed for Moscow. When all are gone, the Simpleton is left to lament Russia’s fate.

Courtesy of Opera News

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